Agriculture and Modern Technology: A Defense (review)

Max Weber once remarked that "'Scientific' pleading is meaningless in principle because the various value spheres of the world stand in irreconcilable conflict with each other." For Weber, of course, scientific inquiry had much to offer in providing the means to "master life technically." But science ultimately had no place in the field of values. At the end of the day, the battles between competing value spheres could not be made amenable to rational scientific inquiry. Like any good lawyer, Weber knew that policy debates which drew their energy from deeply held convictions could never be resolved through an appeal to science. The tension between "values" on the one hand and "science" on the other was a social fact that thus provided an important point of departure for any social-scientific approach to contentious policy issues.

Weber's insights would find considerable traction in the current debate over agricultural biotechnology, and in technology policy more generally. Indeed, they would be especially worth considering by those who seemingly cannot understand why "rational" debate over the place of technology in the contemporary agro-food system is so difficult—a point that is clearly lost on Thomas R. DeGregori, an economist who finds nothing but hysteria and irrationality among those who question the current state of industrial agriculture. In his new book, DeGregori chastises what he refers to as "anti-technology elitism" for refusing to recognize the benefits associated with modern technology (particularly in agriculture). He spends the first third of the book outlining a philosophy of technology, and his argument here is simple: because we are technological beings—that is, because the use of tools has been intimately involved with our evolution as human beings—it makes no sense to speak of technology as a source of alienation. (One wonders what DeGregori would make of Marx's arguments regarding technology and the labor process.) But this is not DeGregori's main mission. In the latter two-thirds of the book, he offers a wide-ranging "defense" of the many benefits that have come from technological advance, particularly in agriculture. From fluoridation to antibiotics to genetically modified crops, the reader is treated to a veritable litany of progress.

Technological enthusiasm has found an ardent supporter in DeGregori, and his book will serve as a placeholder for those seeking a compilation of the many benefits that have come from technology in agriculture. Here DeGregori's book is less philosophical and more activist in orientation. As such, it adds little to the history of technology. Nor does it have much to say to contemporary science and technology studies. This is not a piece of primary research seeking to uncover and explain how technology operates in the world; it reads more like a position paper, drawing selectively on a vast secondary literature in order to prove a point.

DeGregori's book is most interesting, then, if we see it as an artifact of an important and ongoing debate about the proper place of technology in the agro-food system. And while it provides plenty of ammunition for those seeking to advance the cause of technology in agriculture, it also suffers from some considerable shortcomings. Although DeGregori sees nothing of value in the current critique of agricultural biotechnology, he makes no attempt to engage one of the more important concerns animating the antibiotechnology movement: that a handful of large multinational corporations are leveraging their proprietary interests in the new biotechnologies, as well as their acquisition of leading seed companies, to exercise control over vast segments of the global agro-food system.

Situating the debate over biotechnology within a more nuanced political economy would have served DeGregori well. Instead, he falls back on ad hominem attacks against the antimodernist tendencies of those who question the industrialization of agriculture. In one chapter, for example, he likens the antitechnology movement to the romantic, deep-ecology ethos that, in his view...